Upcycled Tuna Can Ornaments

Claire Armstrong
by Claire Armstrong
7 Materials
$1
30 Minutes
Easy

For me, my favorite part of Christmas is all the preparations, especially the crafting. I love to make my own decorations and ornaments from the stuff around me. Last year I made some cool ornaments out of repurposed eyeglasses (see here). This year I used some tuna tin cans.

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The first thing I did was file any sharp edges on the cans and then spray painted them.

Next, I made a cork base for the inside of the tuna cans. I just used an old IKEA cork trivet for this.

I love to craft with old dictionary papers. The pages make very affordable craft paper and you get a lot pages in a dictionary. Like maps dictionaries go out of date and can be picked up for pennies at your local thrift/charity stores if you don't have one at home.

I decoupaged the inside of the can with the dictionary paper.

I gave the outside of the tin cans a more festive look, by decoupaging it with old Christmas gift wrap scraps.

My blog is full of wonderful vintage images, for this craft I decided to focus on butterflies. You can download for three two sheets of butterfly images for this craft.


I chose a butterfly for each tin can and carefully cut them out with a papercraft knife.

I then used specimen pins to mount the butterfly inside the tin can.


I made three of these tin can butterfly ornaments. You can find a lot more free vintage images to use here.


I have made a cool old-style butterfly wall decoration (see here), including many wonderful free vintage butterfly images.

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Claire Armstrong
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3 of 4 questions
  • Jay Jay on Nov 09, 2020

    Where do you get the specimen pins?

  • Pita1946 Pita1946 on Nov 09, 2020

    Tuna cans? The smell never comes out.

  • Rose Rose on Nov 09, 2020

    Where is the picture of the finish project?

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